The Real Blackened Fish
Welcome to [Untitled Food Magazine], an independently owned digital food magazine. Our Thursday editions are where we feature a great new recipe. Tuesday is for features.
IN THIS ISSUE: One last reminder about our incoming new name, and a metaphysics of magnets via Jacques Derrida’s favorite snack.
Appetizers
New Name Incoming
Dear readers, thank you for sticking with us through this transitional time. At long last, we are prepared to emerge from our [Untitled Food Magazine] chrysalis with a new name.
We don’t want to ruin the surprise, but stay tuned for a metamorphosis by this time next week. (If you know what caterpillars tend to turn into, you may be able to guess the first two letters of our new nom de pub.)
The most important thing to note is that newsletters will start hitting your inbox from our new URL next week, and our stories will also live on a website of a different name. Everything else, from features and recipes to the way you manage your subscription and the look of the magazine, will stay the same—you don’t have to do anything except keep on reading.
Thanks again, and please let us know if you have any questions. —Alex, Amiel, Cale, Nozlee, and Sam
De la Bananatologie
“There is no outside-text,” deconstruction daddy Jacques Derrida once said, in a book that sailed so far over my freshman-year head it landed back in Paris. I keep these two magnets on my fridge anyway—there is a joy in imagining the riddlingly dogmatic philosopher being interviewed at an arthouse cinema and presented with a snack. “You can write that,” he said in 2002. “I love banana bread.” A commitment to deconstruction may preclude the transcendental, but none of that matters in the face of a transcendent slice of snacking loaf.
After many years of laughing at the little yellow sign—incorrect quote and all—hauntologically on view at Film Forum’s concession stand, I saw that the theater had released it as a magnet. It was sold out, but I absolutely had to have one. So I called. Too often. Visited in person. They were out of production, I was told as recently as a few months ago. So I finally broke—I dusted off Adobe Illustrator and logged in to Etsy dot com. My bootleg arrived a week later, and as soon as it hit my fridge, the beast inside was sated. Then, the truly unexpected: another package arrived. Inside was a magnet almost identical, typographically, but with a différant banana yellow hue. The real magnet! Here’s an IRL [UFM] NYC scoop for you: My partner Sharanya walked into Film Forum to catch Luchino Visconti’s White Nights and discovered you can currently find them at the concession stand. (They remain sous rature online.) —Alex
The Real Blackened Fish
By Amiel Stanek
“Very few things have broken into the mainstream that are fully chef-invented.”
I spent ten long minutes watching a cast iron skillet preheat over the maximum BTUs that the heavy-duty outdoor propane burner had to offer. They say that anticipation is the best sauce, which was good news—I didn’t plan on serving the fish with any condiment at all, and there was anticipation aplenty. Residual oil on the surface of the pan smoked at first, and then the iron began to turn a menacing shade of gray I had never seen before. I felt anxious on behalf of the catfish fillets on the plate beside me, coated in a combination of melted butter and a ruddy spice mix that would surely burn to inedibility within seconds. I held my breath as I laid the fish down in careful little rows, then hopped back to a safe distance as quickly as I could.